No, I think it is pretty clear that they are already trying to kill us, and failing spectacularly, as has already been mentioned.
Actually eyelash mites (like these little cuties) are benign, except when they’re present in exceptionally high numbers in people who don’t wash regularly. Given that they have teeth/suckers, and live near our eyes, I think they could at the very least blind us, paving the way for the animal takeover.
When I saw the thread title, my first thought was “Hmmm, looks like START started a new thr…huh? Carnick??”
As to the OP, humans would be royally screwed.
[QUOTE=LSLGuy]
6) If most urbanized/suburbanized humans do the horror-flick thing and simply cower in the basement screaming until the ants devour them, well the humans are doomed. the critters will go house to house and that’ll be that.
The rural folks will put up a good fight but they can be overwhelmed by numbers. The rancher with 1000 cattle, 3 men and 5 rifles is probably gonna be overrun before they knew what hit them. Ditto the farmer with no livestock, 600 acres and a few thousand rodents and birds on his land versus him, his wife, their kids and their 1 farmhand.
QUOTE]
Flamethrowers.
Flamethrowers.
Flamethrowers.
Flamethrowers…and BBQ.
The food is coming to us gentlemen, and we have the means to cook it.
Battleships, Aircraft Carriers, and Subs…oh, my!
All animals have a fear of fire…use it. Even a can of Aqua Net and a lighter makes a good weapon.
What happens when all our crops and forests have burned down? We’ll have plenty of roast pitbull and black bear, but without plant life the food chain will break down. And we’d probably have to destroy all the crops, to be sure of killing all the insects. Although if animals were really intelligent, and not just berzerk, the insects would just eat all the crops (the insect predators who stop the crop eaters normally would no longer defend the crops), knocking out the bottom of the food chain.
Oh, and I just thought of something: dust mites! They could crawl into people’s throats while we’re sleeping and block out the air. I can’t think of any disinfectant that would kill every dust mite in the average bed sheet.
I think the only way we have a shot is if it’s humans vs. other vertebrates. There are over a quadrillion insects on the planet; they could silently envelope us in a deadly blanket of legs and feelers while we’re reaching for our flamethrowers. Bugs would also be good at hiding from fire inside the ground.
I am sure we’ll be able to come up with some kind of a heavier-then-air gas that would go down their holes and kill them. Concern yourself not about bugs, there is a small but dedicated group of people out there that has them under control.
The bugs would literally chew our asses off. We’d have to lay waste to the entire Earth to get rid of them, in which case we starve. Animals, hands down.
Just operating within the parameters.
Sleeping? This is war, not a slumber party! Work in shifts…swab each others throats…even swallow and digest them. How many of those critters would it take to block off an air passage? They’re probably incapable of doing it, let alone know where to block.
Reaching for the flamethrower? Hell no, you wear those things morning, noon and night UNTIL there is a break in the onslaught. It just takes a sweeping motion to create a large kill zone of the insects. My 20 unit cell of flamethrowers spaced 100’-200’ apart should limit the insect’s ability to amass a huge assault. If they are hiding in the ground, they can’t readily attack, that’s where my crack DDT units follow behind the flamethrower cells, laying a film of sterilizing death on the ground.
JOIN ME OR DIE!
In urban areas it would be mice and rats. Hasn’t anyone seen BEN?
Squirrels are pretty nasty too, and very very fast. With dangerously long and sharp teeth.
Birds are pretty much everywhere. Imagine if every pigeon did a kamkazee on someone downtown. It would be like getting hit in the head with a book someone dropped ten stories.
And I’d have to agree, all the bacteria and tiny critters are already trying to kill us, they just can’t.
You don’t think we’ll be doing some “chewing” ourselves?
quadrillion = 1015 = 166,6667 insects per human…I’ve killed this many on a bad day…without my flamethrower.
6 billion = 6 x 109
Who’s with me?
Currently they’re milling about more or less at random. If they really got organized, kiss your ass goodbye.
I doubt it. The animals wouldn’t know to attack them.
As to the OP, I’m betting on the animals.
I hate to break this to you, but I do not possess a flame thrower. Neither do you, and neither does anyone else. Even the Army doesn’t have many left, if any.
But let’s suppose you find one. Your problem is that you’ll run out of fuel for your flamethrower in, oh, one minute. Since you’ll burn your house down protecting yourself from the insects that would flood in to get you, you’d have to go outside or burn to death. (Actually, you’d probably burn yourself up just trying to use a flame thrower inside, but let’s assume you survive somehow.) And then they’d be everywhere, coming at you from all sides. And a flamethrower has maybe thirty seconds of fuel. You’d maybe, top end, get 0.001% of the animals that were trying to kill you.
Not to point out the obvious here, but you may want to ask yourself WHY armies don’t usually carry flamethrowers anymore, or why they don’t outfit every soldier with flamethrowers. They don’t work very well.
Your plan is absurd. You’re dead meat, pal.
The hell you say!
I certainly ain’t gonna lay down and die admitting defeat.
Fine. You suffer longer.
People, we seem to be falling for the Hollywood hordes of animals everywhere. The OP sceanrio has all teh animals go on the attack. that doesn’t mean there’s suddenly a much larger number of them. There are only so many animals in any area. Excluding birds, they’re not that mobile. Most animals live out their lives within a mile of where they’re born. For insects, it frequently only a few hundred feet.
There are probably enough ants in my county to make a pile the size of a small office building. They’d eat me quickly if it was all of them versus just me alone… But I don’t have to fight them all. I just have to kill the ones already living on my property. You kill the ones on your property and so on and the job is done.
It’s not 1 person versus a gajillion ants, it’s one family versus a few thousand square feet of dirt with however-many ants in it. Particularly if the news travels faster through human circles than through aniimal, so I know they’re up to no good before they get moving, I’ll be able to take care of my part. As long as my neighbors do the same, we’re fine.
it’ll be a mess, and an ecological disaster, but we can stop the onslaught if we try.
At the same time, I’d expect a lot of people to react per RickJays scenario, wherein we’'d be so busy destroying our own society that our one supposed advantage, brains, gets us nothing. And then we lose.
I don’t know about you, but all this talking about roasting little animals has me hungry. I’m gonna go get dinner. Adios.
Exactly - they have the I-Hate-Humans virus, meaning they would have no more organizational skills than normal.
What are we considering as animals? There are various organisms cohabitting in and on my body that I require the cooperation of to sustain life (as I understand it.) If those decide they hate me and go on strike then I and 100% of every other human else dies right there.
If we are considering insects up only, then I don’t see that much would change. So far as the animal kingdom is concerened its you (or maybe your species) vs everything else. Pets might turn, but everything else should stay the same.
When’s the last time you went to a city park and every living thing in it was driven by an overpowering urge to rip you to pieces?
I’m guessing things would be much different.
If you are talking about all living organsms. bacteria would win…